Facing up to wrongdoing in Abu Ghraib
Yahoo%21 News - Abu Ghraib Soldier Admits to Some Charges
David Dishneau writes an information-packed story for the AP, revealing much more, I think, than the headline indicates.
- One more admission of wrongdoing.
HAGERSTOWN, Md. - The highest-ranking Army reservist charged with abusing Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison said Monday he will plead guilty to some offenses because "what I did was a violation of law."
Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II, of the Maryland-based 372nd Military Police Company, said in a written statement e-mailed to The Associated Press by his attorney: "I have accepted responsibility for my actions at Abu Ghraib prison. I will be pleading guilty to certain charges because I have concluded that what I did was a
violation of law."
The three-paragraph statement did not specify the charges to which Frederick will plead guilty, and it wasn't clear whether he would still contest any of the allegations. He is charged with maltreating detainees, conspiracy to maltreat detainees, dereliction of duty and wrongfully committing an indecent act.
. . .
Frederick, a Virginia state prison guard in civilian life, is among seven members of the Cresaptown, Md.-based 372nd charged in the scandal, which involves physical abuse and sexual humiliation of prisoners.
He would be the second of the seven to admit wrongdoing. Spc. Jeremy C. Sivits of Hyndman, Pa., pleaded guilty to three abuse charges in May and was sentenced to a year in prison.
. . .
Frederick's mother, Jo Ann Frederick . . . said on Monday that she did not know what offenses her son planned to acknowledge.
"I can only say that Chip has told us things, and it's not that it was so much hands-on things, but he is responsible for what some of the others did, and some of the things he did he feels were not right," she said.
- Evidence that more than "a few bad apples" were responsible.
Frederick has claimed the abusive treatment was orchestrated by military intelligence officers rather than MPs, according to a diary his family made available.
In his statement Monday, Frederick said he hoped that "all those within the Army who contributed to or participated in the chaos that was Abu Ghraib" accept responsibility.
Public recognition of the propriety Darby's whistle-blowing.
He also expressed concern about Spc. Joseph M. Darby, a member of the 372nd credited with tipping off Army investigators to the abuse. Relatives of Darby said last week that he is in protective military custody, partly because of threats from people in their communities who believe he betrayed his fellow soldiers.
Frederick said he harbored no ill will toward Darby: "He did what he thought was right, and it was right," Frederick wrote.
- An indication that the Army is not doing as much as it should be to further the investigation of Abu Ghraib.
In Mannheim on Monday, a military judge hearing evidence in the abuse cases demanded that prosecutors speed up the investigation. Col. James Pohl expressed displeasure after being told a lone Army criminal investigator was reviewing thousands of pages of records contained in a secret computer server at Abu Ghraib.
I'm sure others will look at the meat of this story and draw many conclusions. It does provide a wealth of issues to look at. But what strikes me is the admission of wrongdoing, i.e., the act of admitting that one has done something wrong. That's a tough thing to do for just about anyone. It must be ever so much harder for someone who felt he was following orders and doing something important for his country.
Even harder, I think, will be task for those who defend the actions in Abu Ghraib to come to the conclusion that it was wrong, because it means, to some extent, that we would have to say that our country was wrong. That's a tough nut to swallow for any patriot.
Yet we know that, as individuals, we do grow when we face up to the wrongs that we have done. Without facing up to them, we are consumed by guilt and the struggle to rationalize our wrong behavior. When we admit the wrongdoing, we may still have to face the consequences, but we end the struggle to twist something wrong into something right, we lessen the burden of guilt, we can set about making things better. That might include reversing the wrong, compensating for the wrong, or simply not straying down that path again.
Abu Ghraib is a stain on our national honor. We can do better. I heartily wish that we would.
posted by Carolyn A. Parker @ 7:48 AM
5 Comments:
I don't beleive anything that happened in that prison was "wrong". When in Rome, right? They have beheaded our people on T.V. It's a war, you do what you have to do to gain information or control prisoners. They're not going to follow any set guidelines. If you are playing a game or fighting a war and 1 side is "cheating" you don't stand a chance of winning. We have to play by their rules.
Well, Trashman, you are not alone in your opinion. It's not, I think, for any of us a simple black and white situation, and we can, depending upon our perspectives, reach different conclusions from the same data.
I do hear what you are saying, and I understand how you can feel that way. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
More when I get back home. In the meantime, take care.
Great post, as usual. I agree, I feel that the "little fish" are paying the price in this fiasco. And I disagree with my buddy Trashman. What these troops did was wrong. I'm posting a little thing about this right now.
I like the new look, btw.
Thanks for the compliment, Jack. I am playing around with the template a bit. I would like to make some more changes, but I have such limited computer skills that it will take a while for me to figure things out.
I don't want Trashman to think we're piling up on him about Abu Ghraib. It's a hard thing to deal with, especially when Trashman points out the brutality of "the enemy." Some truly horrifying things have happened in this war.
The problem for me is that I can't see "the enemy" as monolithic. I think that there are several groups opposing the U.S. in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. While they may be uniformly opposed to the U.S., they may have separate and sometimes divergent reasons for doing so. It would not be wise, I think, to assume that there is a single "enemy."
Just as important, I'm thinking, is paying attention to the goals of the various groups. In some cases, general mayhem and thuggery may be the goal. In others, some specific opposition to specific (real or perceived) U.S. goals may be at work. Some of this latter opposition has to be considered in terms of its at least arguable legitimacy.
But most important, I do believe, is that a number of innocent persons were incarcerated at Abu Ghraib. People who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. People who were taken to meet a quota. People who were viewed as less that human because they were the "other," not "one of us."
None of this speaks, of course, to the actual so-called intelligence gathering tactics at Abu Ghraib and whether they amounted to torture. I'm trying to think of analogies that might make some of these tactics clearer to an American. It's not fun, so I think I'll let it ride for a while.
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